Hello,
I found this mod quite interesting and nice looking. However I feel it needs some balancing to be more usefull.
They are intrinsecly balanced by the fact they are limited in number so can't be overpowered unless they are everywhere. To compete against other energy souces however they need to be attractive !
Some suggestions :
Increase vents numbers and richness to power between a few 10's of steam turbines (and keep more richness + more spots the more distance from the start like other ressources).
Enable the vents from the starting area, it is in the starting area that it will be the most usefull and for that they should : be able to spawn in the starting aera (currently they are forbidden there), be able to provide a somewhat interesting amount of power ; I feels like around 10 steam engines would be nice kickstart as soon as you get Steel but not overpowered, you'll need way more power soon anyway and you'll have plenty of options for this (coal, solar, nuclear).
This would be especially interesting in a Deathworld setting where reducing pollution at the begining is vital, a rush to Steel to use geothermal as soon as possible would be a viable strategy if it can provide a reasonnable amount of power ; ~10 steamengines at the very least will make it useful.
Further out, lone vents may not be practical to exploit, the only reason would be if they are close to ressources to power an outpost. Having the vents spawn close to ressources would make them attractive ; in a 1 out of 5 ressource patch frequency for exemple (in fiction you could say, geological instability close to ressources make geothermal vents more frequents).
Thanks for your feedback.
Yeah, the map placement/generation is the thing I'm least satisfied with, honestly, and I've been meaning to give that another pass. Factorio's generation algorithms have changed a lot since I last really messed with them and while it's a lot more powerful it's also a lot different; the current setup is basically a lazy slightly edited copy of the game's system for oil.
The vent 'strength,' however, is wholly intentional; they're not meant to be a viable long-term power source unless you luck into a really huge field. I can make this an adjustable setting, however, and probably a (default on) option for guaranteed steam in the starting area (in the current version it can spawn there but isn't guaranteed like the other base resources are).
I'm afraid I have to echo VortiK's thoughts on this. I've got radar coverage out a fair ways from the starting area, enough to turn up uranium and oil, but I've not even seen a single steam vent. If they need steel to tap (by which point you've already needed to set up a fairly robust power system), AND they're scarce, they should be at least somewhat potent - honestly, as VortiK said, their being tied to a particular location on the map is a SERIOUS handicap in itself. (Water, as one of the limiting factors in most other forms of power, is common, and there are mods aplenty to get it anywhere in exchange for a small amount of power and a somewhat more expensive pump to run with it; once you have trains, moving solid forms of fuel - including nuclear fuel - from place to place is fairly straightforward, and a single trainload will probably keep you going for a good long time even with coal.) Now it sounds like I shouldn't even bother looking for them, because by the time I can locate, secure, and exploit one, the yield will be insignificant - and certainly not worth using (and defending!) unless it's right next to something else I already want.
I'd rather see the taps be more expensive to make, and possibly needing separate research (maybe gated behind Fluid Handling, if preferably not with chemical/blue science), but be more potent. As it is, by the time you CAN use them, you have no reason to do so.
Another possibility, while perhaps more involved than you want it to be, would be that, somewhat like rocket silos, the taps need to be supplied with additional material once installed - representing pipes or whatever else - to actually become viable steam sources, though the amount of material involved might vary from one vent to another (and might be proportional to how much steam you can expect to get out of it). Either way, it's investment into a useful resource, whereas however cheap the tap ITSELF might be now, the infrastructure required to reach, exploit, and defend the tap means I'd probably be better served just pushing for uranium, concentrating my time and materials on that processing chain rather than getting a (next to my overall power grid) tiny bit of supplemental energy.
Honestly, my initial draft for the tap recipe only cost iron and was available from the start but it felt kind of weird to not have an unlock of some kind. In retrospect, I should have kept it; I'll go ahead and revert it.
As mentioned, the map generation needs another pass. If you top out resource settings and look through a few previews, you'll notice that a lot of steam vents get marked in the middle of ore resource patches, which then preempt them when the "real" map gen runs. When I (better understand and) revamp the internal settings it should be a lot better.
Incidentally, any comments or suggestions regarding the "art" (recolored electric furnaces) I used? My skills are limited to tweaking existing graphics but I'm open to suggestions.
It's coming along. Still needs work, but it's coming along.
https://i.imgur.com/c7RB1hT.png
Awesome !
In RL, geothermal vents are usually located in volcanic landscapes. These are not available in vanilla Factorio, but Alien Biomes has them. I think the following would make sense:
With Alien Biomes:
- Only spawn geothermal vents in volcanic areas, but increase their number. They can require steel because having lots of them relatively close together makes them a worthwhile source of additional energy even beyond the early game, thus justifying the investment in infrastructure.
- If the starting area happens to be in a volcanic landscape, the requirement for steel could be dropped so geothermal energy becomes a viable power source in early game.
Without Alien Biomes:
- Geothermal vents could occur less frequent, could be possible in every kind of landscape, and should not require steel so they'd be useful in the early game. Basically, no Alien Biomes would mean leave geothermal vents as they are now. :-)
Could you implement something like that, or are there any problems with it I might have overlooked?
Alien Biomes is a cosmetic mod; it doesn't actually create any "volcanic" area in a sense that is readily detectable in a data related way. It could be done, but it would be kind of hacky and/or hardcodey in ways that would likely break if Alien Biomes changed, say, an internal name or filename. And it would be a lot of work. So... no. Sorry.
Well, it seemed to be detectable, this mod does something like it already: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Geothermal. (Looking for an alternative to it, though -- for different reasons I don't want to discuss in public.)
I really don't know how much effort that involves, or how hacky that other mod's solution is -- you're the judge there. However, it would be a way for a more realistic experience, and to make Alien Biomes a bit more than just a cosmetic mod. (I know that this is not your responsibility -- just think it would be nice if lots of different mods could play together and add to each other and the vanilla game, for the sake of end users.)
It's a pity you don't want to do it, but it's your decision, really -- and I certainly understand that you don't want to be burdened with lots of additional work! :-)
Generally I try to write my mods to integrate/cooperate with the engine as much as possible, and be accommodating of other mods' changes to the system, or potential vanilla changes. The geothermal mod above adds resources to the game via script after the engine has created the map, and checks for specifically named terrain from Alien Biomes while doing so. If Alien Biomes changes its names, the "integration" will break (the mod won't break from what I can tell from a brief browsing, it just won't be cooperating with Biomes). Geothermal Vents adds its version of the resource to the map generation system Factorio already uses; it then uses runtime script to make the pretty little steam puffs. That's why you can see steam vents on the map gen preview, and is the way I like it (and is why I'm having issues updating it to work the way I want). I could also add manual placement of vents in volcanic areas, but, again, it would rely on Alien Biomes being written in a certain way and if something changed it could break. That's bad design and something I usually ( :D ) try to avoid.
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation! Knowing next to nothing about the details of modding, I usually can just make suggestions that seem like a good idea to me. Sometimes they can be implemented, sometimes it's impractical, or even impossible. However, I wouldn't know before someone points out what is wrong with it that something is wrong with it, or why. :-)
I kind of took a break from this as I learned more about the map gen system. I've been working on a mods that hopefully will be a group of settings useful for various purposes, but so far I just have one intended to implement https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RepeatingIslands but, uh, better. I should be able to get back to Geothermal soon. And armed with knowledge.
Preview: http://imgur.com/gallery/EU4EHsy
Hello,
I read some reviews, with most I agree.
But I will have a request to the author of this fashion. I ask to make the mod optional, namely to make some options available to change. In particular, the ability to set the size of pollution or shutdown pollution at all. And also set the complexity of the study and its necessity.
Thank you in advance
Are you replying in the right thread? I'm honestly unsure what you're even asking about.
